Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamisonis an American novelist and essayist. Her work has been published in Best New American Voices 2008, A Public Space, and Black Warrior Review. Originally from Los Angeles, she attended Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and undertook a Ph.D. in English literature at Yale. Her father is the economist and global health researcher Dean Jamison...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
sentiments suspects ifs
Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.
county facade handsome jail pass stone towers twin
You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.
animals curly full houses stuffed yard
The 'here' of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. 'Here' is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf.
redeeming subjects
Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.
teacher lucky way
I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.
writing class long
Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
sarcastic hurt clever
Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-absorption without self-awareness.
hook
Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.
reading editors people
The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
age answers might
Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.
nice book writing
Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.
beautiful color jail
You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.
empathy our-actions might
Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.
people empathy feelings
I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.